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PokerBaazi: The Ace In India's Hands

PokerBaazi: The Rise of Mobile Gaming in India

PokerBaazi: The Ace In India's Hands

*This is in partnership with BQ Prime Brand Studio

The platform, which is India’s biggest for poker, recently hit a record of 1000 concurrent players playing online cash game format on PokerBaazi.com.

Confined to home with extra time on their hands during the pandemic lockdowns, millions of Indians discovered digital gaming, and took to it in droves, as they realised these games were great fun, excellent stressbusters, safe, and built around communities. Based on the booming segment and then thanks to this trend, Baazi Games, a leader in gaming, has nearly doubled its user base in the last two years with almost 11.5 million users today, up from about 5.5 million before the pandemic.

The Rise of Mobile Gaming in India

The online gaming industry as a whole has seen a huge uptick in numbers and will continue to grow. Reports from gaming-fund Lumikai as well as consulting firm BCG, along with Sequoia Capital, predict that the Indian gaming market is seeing an unprecedented rise in the number of paying gamers, estimated to reach 235 million people by 2025. This is expected to triple the Indian mobile gaming market, making it a $5 billion+ industry.

Leading this space is Baazi Games’ #1 offering, PokerBaazi. Launched in 2014, today PokerBaazi is 2 million+ strong in terms of user base, and a diverse one at that, from large cities to small towns and from varied backgrounds.

How PokerBaazi Won the Gaming Market

In May 2021, the new, revamped PokerBaazi app was launched keeping in mind pandemic-driven demand. The update introduced new engagement features such as emoticons, voice chat, and a live winner’s tab along with an integrated payment system.

This led to a whopping 64% revenue growth for PokerBaazi in the last year, making it the #1 ranked poker website in India, according to PokerScout, one of the top global poker listing websites. PokerBaazi then capitalised on its popularity in March 2022 by bringing together top poker players from across the country for its flagship series—the National Poker Series (NPS). Over 96000 entries from across India played online to try and get into the finale event held in Goa. NPS is not just about the number of participants or the prizes on offer—in fact, being among the top players in the series is about the glory of winning a gold medal in poker and representing India at Las Vegas.

In fact, what the Olympics is to athletes, the Super Bowl in the US is to American football (rugby), or what the IPL is to Indian cricket, the NPS is now to poker in India—it has provided an invaluable boost to the game, the glory of winning and representing India, and has endowed celebrity status for the top players.

Big Vision for the Future

Navkiran Singh, the founder & CEO of Baazi Games, has big plans for the future to capitalise on the growth in online gaming and the growing interest in poker. With the National Poker Series (NPS), PokerBaazi has catalysed a major upturn in interest as well as improved the optics surrounding the game of poker. From initially being perceived as a game of luck by some, poker in India is now seen as a game of skill dealing with intricacies such as human psychology, mathematics, and strategy.

With India being home to the second-largest online gaming market in the world, Singh believes that even though the pandemic brought about an unusual spike in growth, the gaming industry will continue to boom.

Singh has a goal of creating a comprehensive poker ecosystem, which includes raising knowledge of the game and facilitating learning about it through innovative technologies. PokerBaazi is now working on a series of auxiliary apps like Poker School in order to create a universe, as part of a larger campaign to establish poker as a distinct sporting category in the country, similar to cricket, hockey, and football. While Baazi Games continues to grow rapidly in India, with over 11 million+ users, the company also has plans to expand into the international market in the near future.

PokerBaazi is well on its way to further strengthen its position as a market leader in this fast-growing industry, starting with enhancements in technology and by investing in segments like Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR & VR), as well as the metaverse. With its fast-popularising poker properties, PokerBaazi is expected to grow by 100% over the next year and eventually aims to make poker a household game in India.